Thursday, April 6, 2017

Ohio Democrat voters say national Democrat Party is still ignoring the people who could've helped them defeat Trump. Mahoning County leader says Hillary lost all credibility with working class voters-Washington Post, 4/5/17

Good luck to Ohio Democrat voters. We know what it's like. The Republican Party has no interest in Republican voters either.

But
worst of all, they said, the party hadn’t learned from what they saw as
the biggest message from November’s election: Democrats have fallen
completely out of touch with America’s blue-collar voters.

Since
the election, Democrats have been swallowed up in an unending cycle of
outrage and issues that have little to do with the nation’s working
class, they said, such as women’s marches, fighting Trump’s refugee ban
and advocating for transgender bathroom rights.

Mahoning Cty, Ohio

The
party’s national leaders have focused on decrying Trump, opposing his
Supreme Court pick and tying his administration to Russia. That approach
— trying to defeat Trump solely by attacking him and his policies —
already has failed once, many at the dinner said.

Meanwhile,
they think few are talking about issues that really matter to people in
places such as Youngstown: Stagnant wages, vanishing jobs and
sputtering economies. Even the Democrats’ recent success in blocking
Trump’s attempt to repeal President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act
matters little in the face of those core interests, local party leaders
said. And unless the party begins addressing those blue-collar issues,
they said, there will be real and dire consequences in states like
theirs.

In more than a dozen interviews, party
leaders across Ohio — from local precinct captainsto the handful of
Democrats who remain in Congress — said they are deeply worried.

“Every
time Trump so much as sneezes, we as a party are setting our hair on
fire and running around like it’s the end of the world,” Betras said as
the dinner wound down. “Most people around here don’t care. They are
living paycheck to paycheck, just trying to hold on. After everything
that’s happened, if we as a party still aren’t speaking to them, then we
are never getting them back.”...

Blue collar issues...

Ohio’s Democratic Party has launched kitchen-table
conversations to reorganize its agenda around economic concerns. U.S.
Sen. Sherrod Brown recently unveiled a 77-page proposal for populist, pro-worker initiatives that could serve as a blueprint for the national party.

But
the most forceful move came in U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan’s failed attempt to
wrest control of the House minority leadership from Nancy Pelosi. In his
pitch to fellow Democrats, the Ohio lawmaker argued that there is
something fundamentally broken in the party’s relationship with the
workers who once made up its base....

Most acknowledge the need for a stronger economic message, but there has
been pushback against the idea of chasing white working-class voters to
the detriment of minorities and social issues....

“It’s a false choice to say we have to decide between economic issues
and civil rights. They’re all part of the larger problem of inequality
that we should be fighting against,” said Neera Tanden, president of the
Center for American Progress, which is bringing together party
luminaries in May for an brainstorming conference."...

[Ed. note: Why do you "have to decide between economic issues and civil rights?" Who says you can't have both?]

(continuing): "At a bar on the hollowed-out edges of Youngstown,
Betras slid a memo dated May 12, 2016,across the table. It was then
that he saw the wave of anger coming and tried to warn Clinton’s
campaign.

“I know I am just a chairman but I
am a chairman in the trenches,” Betras wrote in the three-page memo,
begging Clinton to focus on jobs.

He sent his memo to Clinton’s top campaign adviser in Ohio and other senior party officials. But Betras never heard back.

Months later, he said he thinks his party leaders still haven’t gotten the message....

In recent decades, Democrats have relied on a new base, a diverse mix of
minorities, millennials, women, LGBT and college-educated voters — who
had turned out in droves for Obama but not for (Hillary) Clinton....

Lou
Gentile, 37, was among the Ohio casualties in November. A rising local
Democratic star, he lost his state Senate seat in a district struggling
with coal mining declines in the Ohio Valley.

“It’s
tough getting caught in this thing you have no control over,” he said
while driving home after lunch with his former legislative aide in
Columbus, the state’s capital....

The party’s losses
have made it difficult to cultivate a strong bench for future elections,
he said. It also has allowed Republicans to redraw Ohio’s districts,
making it even more difficult for Democrats to claw their way back to
relevancy.

“I’m worried about the party,”
Gentile said. “If anything good comes out of this last cycle, I hope
it’s that our national leaders finally get the message about what’s
going on in places like this. We have to go back to basics — jobs,
wages, the things that actually make a difference to people out here.”"

.................

Comment:We were ready for Trump to sell us out because they all do. It turns out Trump was a closet Neocon--the worst kind of human being on the planet. Invading Syria--using US taxpayer dollars--is exactly what the Deep State wanted. It was nice while it lasted. RIP, MAGA.